


Family Portrait

by dragonashes



Series: Quintessence: Undertale One-shots [10]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Genuine happiness, Peace, Spoilers - Undertale Pacifist Route, joy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 02:51:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9103270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonashes/pseuds/dragonashes
Summary: In a quiet moment on the surface, a certain ambassador takes a break from politics to indulge in art.Short and sweet.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Frisk dropped her brush in the jar of water with a faint _plunk_.  She sifted through the coffee mug full of brushes and found one slightly smaller than the last, running her fingers over the rounded tip.  With the edge of her thumb she readjusted the piece of cardboard she had covered in dollops of paint.

The piece before her was hardly a masterpiece - a thought which disheartened her - but it was her best work yet.  She had carefully rendered her family in paint, or as much of it as she could manage.  Mom, Dad, Sans, Papyrus, Undyne, Alphys, Mettaton, and Napstablook stood tall and proud against a gradated background of Ruins-orange and Hotland-red.  It had taken a lot of time and effort, and the faces weren’t exactly right, but it was a work in progress.

She flipped the canvas upside down.

The lower half of the canvas had a background of white and a cool blue that reminded her of the crystals in Waterfall.  Across it lay eight shadows, each one connected to a member of her family.

These were not monster shadows, though.  Frisk had hesitated before painting them in - she didn’t want to hurt someone in her family - but in the end went with her original plan.

The shadows were humanoid.

They matched each member of Frisk’s family in height and body type, but were unmistakably human.  Whereas Frisk’s family were holding hands, crossed left-over-right in front of them (except Napstablook, who had Mettaton’s arm around him), the shadows were standing alone.  Frisk had carefully outlined the hands and arms of the shadow figures in a slightly lighter grey, revealing hands formed into the shape of hearts.  With the canvas upside-down like this, the hearts appeared right-side up, like human souls.

It was, in Frisk’s humble opinion, a telling message.

She set her brush and the piece of paint-covered cardboard on the table behind her, then stood back to evaluate it.  Monsters and humans, each a reflection of the other.  Monsters might claim to be made of love and compassion, but Frisk had seen some truly awful monsters.  She had also - despite monsters’ claims about humans and their souls - seen more kindness and generosity from humans than she ever expected.

Monsters and humans were more alike than either side wanted to admit, honestly.  There were so many people in the world who were willing to overlook the species barrier and simply focus on being rational people in a scary world together.  It was the politicians who tended to divide people into groups, pandering to the ‘ _monster_ demographic’ and advocating for ‘ _monster_ rights’ as if they somehow needed to be treated differently from humans.  Yes, they were different, but...they were all people.

As both an ambassador and a high school student, Frisk saw the best and the worst of both species.  Monsters had so much to learn from humans, and vice versa, but at the end of the day no one group could blame the other.  It was something she fought for: taking each monster, each human, as an individual.   _Don’t generalize._

She evaluated her canvas again, then carefully flipped it back over.  The shadow hands now formed the shape of monster SOULs.

Monsters and humans.  Humans and monsters.

The thought of bringing peace to both…

...filled her with DETERMINATION.

**Author's Note:**

> This arose from coming across one too many 'monsters are 100% good, humans are 100% bad' stories. Let's overlook the fact that monsters try to murder Frisk throughout the game just because she's human (blatant discrimination) and that, in a pacifist playthrough, she frees everyone anyways (blatant forgiveness). That leaves monsters as a group of rational beings with understanding of good and evil and the free will to choose either. In any such population you'll get some very bad people...and some very, very good ones.
> 
> (And some who - like Sans - have seen so much of both that they are overwhelmed by nihilism and feelings of inadequacy and just give up.)
> 
> But yes! Like it says on the tin: short and sweet. I didn't have the heart to post something sad this week.
> 
> Next year is a different story. I have several rather sad one-shots I'm looking forward to sharing (after I re-read them about a dozen times and agonize adequately over my grammatical quirks) and some longer stories I've been working on. One of my two Underfell stories is almost complete, which means I can start posting it soon. Come to think of it, I haven't posted any Underfell one-shots yet, have I?
> 
> Thank you all for all your support! I find it absolutely fascinating to analyze which stories are popular and which aren't. It helps inform my writing.
> 
> Enjoy the rest of 2016!


End file.
